Liberal policies are making the American dream unaffordable

See if you can figure out what these three news stories have in common. First, high-profile political efforts to defund and demoralize entire police forces are giving rise to an unlikely anarcho-capitalist trend. Police are retiring or leaving the profession in droves, and their former departments are failing to recruit new officers in many major cities, thanks mostly to the profound antipathy shown toward the police by elected officials. Meanwhile, wealthy people are increasingly hiring their own pricey private security to protect themselves, their possessions, and their businesses. As a result, private security officers now outnumber police by more than 50%.

Second, new cars have become unaffordable for ordinary people, with the national average sales price hitting $48,000. Part of the problem has been a recent chip shortage that made cheaper vehicles less profitable to produce. But even as that problem recedes, high prices are sticking thanks to government policies. This includes federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, a Cash for Clunkers program that destroyed 677,000 perfectly good cars, many of which would otherwise still be around today driving down new car prices, and government regulations that require unnecessary and expensive features, such as video displays and backup cameras.

The result? Cars have become supercomputers on wheels, and the cost to own a new one has risen from less than 30% of the real median household income in 1995 to 59% in 2023. Just wait until everyone is forced, as California aspires to do, to purchase even more expensive electric vehicles. This policy-driven rise in prices is creating a growing gap between those who can buy new cars and those who cannot. The bottom quintile of earners, the Washington

Post reported, spent less on new cars in 2021 than it had in 11 years, while the top quintile spent more than it has at any time since the government started tracking the data in 1984.

Third, green energy policies are making the nation’s electrical grid less reliable, prompting the wealthy to splurge on backup sources of power. The New York Times coverage feebly links generator-hoarding to “extreme weather linked to climate change.” But its own piece unavoidably admitted that “blackouts will hurt more people as Americans buy electric heat pumps and battery-powered cars to replace furnaces and vehicles that burn fossil fuels — a shift essential to limiting climate change.” In other words, the problem is climate change policy, such as electric vehicle mandates and grid-unfriendly alternatives to fossil fuels.

Blackouts due to bad weather have always been commonplace, but weather cannot explain why California, where the weather is almost always perfect, has more blackouts than any other state, head and shoulders above the rest. California, where severe storms are extremely rare, accounted for 24% of the nation’s blackouts in 2022 despite comprising less than 12% of the nation’s population. Californians also pay 80% more than the national average for their unreliable electricity, according to a recent University of California, Berkeley, study.

If you haven’t figured out the common theme between these three stories, it is that they all demonstrate ways that Democratic policies make the American dream unattainable for an ever-larger number of people. Left-liberals are excluding vast swathes of the population from basic comforts that people have long taken for granted — in these particular cases, personal safety, transportation, and access to reliable, cheap energy.

The result, ironically, is precisely the dystopia of inequality that Democrats suggest they care about. Thanks to their bad ideas, the wealthy are buying new automobiles, stocking up on generators, and paying small fortunes for private security, while ordinary people face more dangerous streets, desperately try to keep decades-old cars on the road, and pay significantly higher electrical bills for increasingly unreliable power.

Voters, take heed before Democrats turn your country into the next New York or California. Unlike today’s Californians and New Yorkers, you will have nowhere to move away to. ⋆